Key facts about Comoros

Geography: Area: 2,230 square kilometres. The Comoros covers three small volcanic islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan and Moheli, in the Mozambique channel, 300 kilometres north-west of Madagascar and a similar distance east of the African mainland.

They declared independence from France in 1975. A fourth island in the archipelago, Mayotte, remains a French territory.

Ethnicity: The original Malay-Polynesian inhabitants were absorbed by waves of Bantu and Arab migrations. Today, Arab and Bantu groups predominate, with Indian and Malagasy minorities.

Capital: Moroni on Grande Comore island.

Language: French and Arabic are both official languages; Comorian, a Swahili dialect, and Malagasy are also spoken.

Religion: Overwhelming majority Sunni Muslim. Catholic minority.

Politics and economy:

Islamist reformer Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi was elected president in 2006 on a vow to tackle the graft that Comorans complain infects both state and private business on the islands.

Mohamed Bacar came to power in Anjouan in a coup. Following an illegal election in June 2007, he was sworn in as Anjouan's president, vowing to defy what he said had been a decade of discrimination against the island.

Comoros has had about 20 coups or coup attempts since independence. French mercenary Bob Denard was involved in four of six successful coups, the first of which took place a month after independence. Denard came out of retirement for Comoros' fifth coup in 1995, and the sixth was in April 1999.

Comoros' population, estimated between 630,000 and 840,000, is growing faster than its economy. Average incomes have been shrinking in real terms for the past 20 years by an estimated 0.5 per cent per person per year. As many as 350,000 Comorians are living in France - many of them in Marseilles.

Comoros has one of the region's lowest rates of HIV/AIDS, but almost half the population lives in poverty. In 2004, life expectancy at birth was 62.9 years, compared with an average 46.2 in sub-Saharan Africa. The same year, the GDP per capita was $693 compared with $588.5 for the sub-Saharan average.

Comoros is one of the most indebted countries in the world. At the end of 2005, public debt was estimated to be $291 million, or some 72 per cent of GDP. More than 80 per cent was owed to multilateral creditors. The two biggest were the World Bank and the African Development Bank.